Top ten books about trees

Fiona Stafford is professor of English language and literature, University of Oxford. Her latest book is The Long, Long Life of Trees.

One of Stafford's ten top books about trees, as shared at the Guardian:

Howards End by EM Forster

I learned from reading this book at school that novels can work through recurrent phrases and enigmatic images. Here, on the very first page, is the wych elm. I had no idea then what a wych elm might be, but I knew that this strange tree, with the pig’s teeth embedded in its trunk, somehow possessed qualities that were beyond the reach of the car-owning colonialists who thought they owned it.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Howards End is among John Mullan's ten best concerts in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue